June 27, 2002

DRM scariness

Weather radar

I'm driving 400km to Lewisporte this afternoon for a friend's wedding. The forecast calls for rain today, so I put together a quick page with the radar images for Newfoundland. Then I realized that the Environment Canada website provides an Eastern Canada composite image in addition to the individual stations.

I'll be back from the wedding Saturday evening. Congratulations Kirk and Ann-Marie!

Web tidbits

If your interests run along a more political line, try Chris Nelson's weblog. He's a Mozilla developer, but lately he's had a lot to say about his disappointment in the Bush administration in the US. Despite his strong left-leaning stance, I can't say that I entirely disagree with him. And I'm supposed to be one of those fundamentalist Christians that make up those right-wing groups.

June 26, 2002

Thinking big

I don't know how many competing proposals there are for the reconstruction of the site of the World Trade Centre in NYC, but WTC2002 is certainly thinking big. I like it. 5 towers, 111 stories. The only drawback with the site is that it is Flash based and broken. It didn't load in Mozilla 1.0, and it stuck while trying to detect the version of Flash installed with MSIE 5 on the school's computer. Try starting at http://www.wtc2002.com/start.lasso if the link above doesn't work for you.

8 down, 2192 to go...

The first 8 registrations for YC2002 in Gander were received this week. This came up at the regular committee meeting last night. The early registration deadline is still a month away, so I think there should be a prize for those folks.

I referred to YC in an earlier entry. I guess I didn't mention that I've been on the committee from the start, so I'm pretty involved with the organization of this event. I think technically I shouldn't say anything about our meeting, but I don't think I'll get in trouble for this one.

By the way, we haven't yet decided what the sell-out number will be, but it will definitely be between 2000 and 2400, probably closer to 2000 (I just picked 2200 for my title arbitrarily). The Gander Community Centre is pretty small so it's going to be packed. If you're out there and thinking of going, I would recommend that you try your best to be registered by the second deadline, at the latest. You wouldn't want to be disappointed...

While I'm on the topic of YC, here's a request for all (three of) my regular readers: if you or anybody you know in Eastern Newfoundland has a Laney VC30, Trace Elliot Mesa Boogie, Fender Hotrod, or Vox AC30 all-tube electric guitar amp, please email me.

June 24, 2002

Weekend update

On Friday I did sound for the AYM end-of-school park party for the high school crowd. Jon Anderson did most of the organization and we took Bethesda's portable PA. I was pleasantly surprised with the amphitheatre in Bowring Park, Prince Edward Plaza. There seemed to be some resonances in the 300 Hz region, but other than that fairly well behaved for sound. I thought that the Bethesda portable system performed really well in the low end, too.

Saturday morning I was supposed to go on a light hike on the North Head Trail around Signal Hill with the folks from my lab - CERL - but I wasn't up to it because of a slightly sore back and allergy symptoms that I blame on Friday night's outdoor work.

Yesterday we had the first of the farewell events for the youth pastor at Bethesda. There were a few presentations at the end of the PM service, then there was a social time and BBQ at Sunshine Camp. It was really great to have so many people from the church hanging out together in one spot. It was sad that it had to be on the occasion of Pastor Dean and Kelly's resignation. You know that we will all miss you, Pastor Dean. Pics to follow later - I have 29 of 40 shots taken now, so I'll get to develop that roll soon.

June 19, 2002

Is the US a free country?

Mike Shaver posted a few interesting tidbits this morning. Some students at Ohio State University were apparently threatened with arrest and expulsion if they didn't face President Bush and cheer as he gave their commencement address. It seems some students don't like Bush's leadership record and had planned a protest in which they would face away from him during the graduation ceremony. Several students went through with it and reportedly nobody was arrested, but one member of the audience was taken from the stadium along with their 3 year old child.

Yeah, sure, it just a bunch of posts on the web, but these days that seems about as reliable as most mainstream media outlets.

June 18, 2002

Minor Updates

I added PDF and Microsoft Word versions of my resume. I also updated my main bass page to have current info and to match the new site look. Yay. Also have found a link to pictures of my custom 6-string fretless bass at the website of the shop that finished it for me. I have a bunch of my own pictures of that bass that I hope to post here as well, shortly.

June 17, 2002

Dad's Retirement Party

Saturday evening my parents hosted a party for 40-50 of their friends from church and work, in celebration of my dad's approaching retirement. The party was a blast, and the fruit salad was great. Thanks for the help Kerry. If I had a digital camera I would have already posted some pics, but alas, I have 20+ exposures left on the APS roll in my camera, so it'll be a while...

June 16, 2002

Black Hawk Down

June 14, 2002

Website promotion

Still haven't found a permanent home for those few links I'd like to have handy or promote, but here are two of them: lytehouse.com - my church youth group, and ycnewfoundland.org the info site for YC2002, Oct 11-13 in Gander. If you are a Christian living in Eastern Canada you should check this event out - great teaching, amazing music, and 2000 excited people your age who just want to have a great time.

Warning! That JPG file may contain a virus!

I submitted an article to slashdot this morning about the suspicious virus alert from McAfee this morning. Something ridiculous about a new virus that can be contained in an image file. "Watch out! Now your photos, your music files or ANYTHING could be a virus!" (Of course, my story was rejected but I'm not complaining. Seriously.) Shortly after, michael posted a story along exactly the same lines as my (and I'm sure many other people's) submission. His conclusion:

And that's really it. If you don't run Windows, you're safe. If you have basic email skills, you're safe. If you don't run Outlook, you're safe. That's the story of modern viruses, and fortunately or un-, it's a pretty boring one."

Of course, lots of virus writers take advantage of buffer overflows, which is essentially a data file being formed in such a way that some specific program will execute the data as code. But that's a far cry from a universal data file virus. In every case, the virus writer has to know the software that you will use to view the data, and then be able to find and exploit a specific flaw in that software.

more randomness...

Just to be complete, while I said a few days ago that MATLAB likes their new random number generator, some peopletake issue with lagged Fibonacci generators and their ilk. Which is understandable. And the answer is 42.

blog: short for web log

While I'm on the weblog kick, daypop is a site that I think is strong evidence for the inbreeding the blogging community. Of course I'm falling into the same trap, composing my site entries by shamelessly reposting things I've read on other blogs...

an apple a day

Just for Kerry, here is an account of one guy's conversion to using a Mac iBook, pretty much like the one you'll probably end up with. He he, who thought my girlfriend would be using unix exclusively before me?

June 13, 2002

Sight-seeing

For the raving masses clamouring for a pic of my stunning girlfriend, here is a picture we took last fall. Yeah, that's me with the receeding hairline. Yeah, that's the city we live in with the beautiful ocean view. Yeah, I scored a hot girl. Aren't you jealous?

Randomness...

Not simply a stream of simply unconnected posts in a generic weblog, but an investigation into the quality of the pseudo-random number generator in MATLAB. Donald Knuths's Seminumerical Algorithms devotes 170 pages to PRNs , and apparently I should "stop reading right now, run to the nearest bookstore, and buy it."
Oh, and I'm going to smarten up and start using headlines for my posts.

Finally updated my resume yesterday.

Turbosound TCS-12M. We finally have new monitor wedges, and new Turbosound amps, too. A vast improvement over the Peavey 12" wedges we used to depend on. Those old ones get passed on to our portable sound system.

On Friday I decided to run a link checking tool on my Mozilla bookmarks file. I had no idea that I had 1750 bookmarks. That file has been accumulating since I started using the internet in 1995 or earlier.

Better templates for everybody!

I knew bte was a good idea, when I ran across it a few months ago. It only took me about 15 minutes to get the about me page to generate using a template based on the nice blogger templates. Now I should be able to quickly redo the rest of my site to match the look of this page. On top of that, I'll be able to update the rest of the site by changing one template file if I ever decide to switch to a different blogger template for the blog portions of the site.

If I ever decide to stop using blogger.com, I think doing a weblog with bte would only be marginally harder than blogger, as well. whopee!

Old site bits

Ok, the old parts of my site are now linked here. They are nearly all horrendously out of date and badly written HTML. My most current interests are hardly represented, if at all. Working on a thesis is a higher priority than updating the website (theoretically).

Newfoundland doesn't exist

For some reason Blogger has a complete listing of time zones, including GMT-330 Newfoundland, but it won't store that setting. So all the times listed on these entries are ahead by 30 minutes until they fix the problem with timezone settings.
Of course, all of my old website contents are still on the site. I finally have a motivation to get a new homepage design done. I'll add the links to the major sections here soon, and then I'll try to rework each section over the summer to be up to date and look fresh.

...and I promptly screw it up.

While setting up this whole blog thing, I made a small typo, and blew away my old homepage. Since I haven't been updating it regularly, my backups are probably years old. Oh well, I should have an automated backup system anyway. My fault. Live and learn. It was time for it to die anyway...

June 04, 2002

Well, I'm late to it,

Well, I'm late to it, but here I come. My first ever weblog entry. In five years I'm sure I'll look back and think about how lame this was, but it can't be any worse than the way my website looks now. I should be updating my resume right now, or at least working on my thesis, but for heaven's sake, I don't even have anything to link to for more info on my thesis. Hopefully this will change things a little...